The world-famous email column

Issue #6 – “Winter Break and Rush” – January 1998

-Well, we’re finally back to school. Thank God! Home got boring after about thirty seconds. Here was my schedule: sleep all day, wake up, shower, eat, take a nap, eat again, watch Breast Men on HBO, get fucked up with my high school boys, come home, repeat for three weeks.

-And at home I ate so much earlier. At school we eat dinner at like 7, 8, or 9 o’clock. At home I was like sitting down to eat at 5:30. I was like, what the fuck is going on here? I felt like I retired and moved to Florida. Two more weeks of that and I swear to God I would have been wearing blue polyester pants and playing shuffleboard!

-And what about using the phone at home! At school I have my own line but at home I don’t. I’m picking up the phone at home like, “Yeah, what the fuck do you want? Oh… Grandma… um, I wasn’t talking to you, I swear!” Plus at home all you have to do is dial, I’m sitting there dialing nine, entering my personal access code, I’m like why the fuck isn’t this working?

-Being at school so much really does fuck you up. Did you ever notice that the temperature inside your dorm is always the same, year-round? I wear short sleeves every day. I go home and it’s like since when did it get so fucking cold in the winter? And what’s with this drinking water straight from the tap? At school I have to send that shit through two Brita filters just to avoid getting tuberculosis!

-Before I left for winter break, my RA kept reminding me, clean out your fridge, clean out your fridge! I’m like, why the fuck would I clean it out now when I’m going home for two weeks? I’ve been here for four months and haven’t cleaned it out once!

-So this chick is driving me home to Long Island from school and we stop at a toll booth on the Jersey Turnpike. My friend is playing around and flirting with the toll collector, who happened to be fairly young. We find out later that he wrote his phone number on the back of her toll receipt! What the fuck was this guy thinking? What is my friend supposed to call him up and go, “Hi, this is the girl from the Honda, meet me at Exit 10”?

-And now here is a Quote of the Month. Recently, my friend Harlan C. from Penn, while discussing the Year 2000 problem in which computers won’t be able to recognize the date change, actually said, “I don’t understand the problem, what did they do in the year 1900?” Fucking idiot.

-I have one of those tote baskets which I use to carry my soap and shampoo into the shower. It’s pretty disgusting already, it’s got all kinds of hair and soap scum on it. What I don’t understand is how the thing got so fucking dirty in the first place. It takes a shower every day! Of all my personal belongings, this basket bathes most often, yet it’s the most gross!

-Speaking of showers, doesn’t it suck when you get in the shower and you realize that you only have a molecule of soap left? First of all, I think to myself, “What the fuck was I thinking yesterday when I realized that there was no soap left? Why the hell didn’t I get some more!?” So of course, being the lazy fuck I am, instead of getting out of the shower, I try to splice my molecule of soap into enough to wash my body. I think that’s how the first atom was spliced. Some scientist was in the shower and he ran out of soap. Of course that doesn’t work for me so I end up washing my body with Pert Plus. Doesn’t quite do the same job, but who the fuck cares?

-I hate people who go to the University of Michigan. All they talk about is sports. I’m talking to my friend Claudio at UM, and I’m like, “How’s the weather up there?” And he says, “You know we won the Rose Bowl?”

-And another thing, the name of this column is “Ruminations!” Not “ramifications,” which is what some chick from Rutgers called it, and not “relicitations,” like some dude in Wiconsin called it (that’s not even a real word!). So for all of you who have been asking me, “ruminations” means reflections or meditations. There, now get it right!

-And now, another Quote of the Month, this one a bit more insightful, from Mike W. at Penn: “Women with boyfriends are basically men.” Couldn’t have said it better myself!

-Well, Rush here at Penn just ended, and what a wild couple of weeks it was! I’ve never eaten so much free food, gotten so fucked up, stolen so many bowling pins, seen so many strippers, or done so little work in my entire life. It was great!

-It seemed like the most popular Rush event was the nine-hole golf course. Now don’t get me wrong, there was absolutely no golf involved whatsoever. Basically each hole is a different off-campus apartment with a different drink. But at one house the third hole was a forty-foot funnel, so most people didn’t even reach the clubhouse, if you know what I mean…

-In the end, Rush was a great experience. I got to meet a lot of cool people and get really fucked up for free. Probably the best parts were going to the lame frats early and eating all the food before the people who were actually interested showed up. In the end, I decided to choose ZBT, and man am I psyched! Now all I have to do is survive pledging. Fuck me!